


My metamorphosis is of your doing

by Baryshnikov



Series: Where Monsters lie [13]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: But to like mind modification?, Butterflies, Dreams vs. Reality, Dubious Consent, I'm not sure how to tag it but it's not that bad, M/M, Mild Gore, POV Second Person, Parasites, Self-Reflection, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 08:45:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18070178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: You no longer wish you were like a butterfly.





	My metamorphosis is of your doing

**Author's Note:**

> I have no justification for what on earth this actually is, other than I'm super tired and it just sort of happened, I don't even know if it belongs in this series, but I'm putting it here, for now. I hope it isn't too dreadful.
> 
> From Harry's perspective

When you were little you dreamed of being a butterfly. You dreamed of being able to fly free, of escaping what fate had given you. You could have sat for hours watching the butterflies in the garden, the large whites hovering over the vegetable patch, and the meadow browns landing for just a moment on the lavender, the stalks bending even under their tiny weight. Your favourite though was the peacock butterfly, so delicate, so exotic, so simply striking. Though what was more incredible really was what it came from. The peacock butterfly caterpillar was nothing particularly extraordinary, just a dark, plain caterpillar. It reminded you of yourself. Your favourite thing to do, when no one was there to tell you not to, was to collect those simple caterpillars, collect them and put them in a jar with holes in the lid. You gave them leaves and other things you thought a caterpillar might like, and in return, they gifted you with insight into the simple little lives. You always wondered whether they knew what was going to happen to them, whether they understood at all inside their tiny heads, that they were going to become beautiful, that they were going to become unrecognisable from their old selves. That was the reason you liked butterflies because they could change, cocoon themselves for weeks and emerge as something completely different, something completely alien to what they were. 

You no longer wish you were a butterfly.

He was inside you before you were even old enough to comprehend what that meant. He was inside you, destined he said, to turn you into something great. He seemed to have charge of all the controls, seemed to know how you worked even better than you yourself did, and as you grew older you could feel yourself changing, altering, transforming. All under the guide of his careful hands, and with every action you could feel him inside you, growing stronger. It is all because of him. You don’t know if you hate _him_ , but you do hate what he is turning you into. Every day you feel him scratching inside your head, whispering things to you that no one else can hear. He asks you to do things, and he asks so nicely that you do them, and you hate yourself in the morning. Hate that you can see exactly what he is doing to you, what he is turning you into, and yet you do nothing. You watch in silence as he twists you out of shape and makes you bitter and cruel, and just like him. You wonder, when you’re crying under your covers at night, whether this is what a caterpillar feels like as it is twisted and crumpled and wrenched, before being put back together again, but not in the same way as before. You wonder whether he enjoy this, whether he enjoys torturing you over and over again. You wonder whether this happened to him. Whether he felt like a caterpillar as it went to cocoon, whether he knew that the cruel boy he was, would ever become such a monster as he had come to be. Could he have fathomed it? Can you? Can you truly imagine what he is turning you into, what sort of person you’re becoming? You cry more, suffocating slowly in the heat of the covers, the tears you shed wetting the sheets in the shapes of chrysalises. 

You no longer wish you were a butterfly.

You dream that he is clawing his way out of you, tearing you apart and emerging from your stomach. You imagine him as a great torrent of butterflies, Purple Emperor butterflies that feed on your flesh. They only eat dead things, but that doesn’t matter because you are dead inside. You can almost feel them fluttering below the surface, filling the cavity that you call your chest, despite it containing no heart. They emerge from your organs, sliding through the holes until everything inside you is stained with black and blue. They eat you slowly. Infect you with whatever poison they have inside of them, and when they have done that, you dream of them bursting out. Once they have glutted themselves on your entrails, gorged themselves on your lungs, and satiated themselves on your heart; there is nothing for them to do. They flitter, thousands of tiny bodies striking you from the inside, beating and beating like hundreds and hundreds of tiny pulses. They are trapped and they want to get out, to them you are a jar, a snare, a chrysalis they have outgrown. Where once you nourished them, now you only hinder them, stop them seeking out something fresher. In those dreams, you are the one to cut yourself open, to let out all those butterflies, let them split your skin, forcing that wound wider and wider until it is a gaping hole; and then they disappear, melting into the dark. But you know they’re still there, lurking in the black, wings together, hiding what they are. As you lay there dying in your dreams, the butterflies watch. He watches. He watches with his thousands of tiny creatures, the ones that gave him the idea to rip you all apart and start again. He watches and smiles because he has achieved what he always wanted. For he always said to you in the midst of your dreams; if you want to live, first you have to die. That is what you dream, night after night after night and no matter what you do, the butterflies will not leave you alone, because he doesn’t want to leave you alone. 

You no longer wish you were a butterfly.

He feeds off you like a parasite, taking what he wants whether you like it or not. It is his body made of butterflies that eats you alive every night, and yet, you don’t hate him. You wish you did. You wish more than anything else in the world, that you could hate him, but you can’t. You like whatever he is doing to you, he makes you like it. That’s what you say to yourself, because how could you ever admit that maybe you like it for what it is? What would that make you, if you said that you liked being torn apart and reconstructed in his image? So, you repeat to yourself that he makes you want it, makes you love it. Though you won’t deny it hurts. It hurts so much to have him scratching and scratching, and scratching, to have him take you apart piece by piece, mould you and twist you and put you back together again. He tells you that you’re beautiful, and when you drag yourself out from your covers and look in the mirror, you have to agree with him. But you don’t recognise yourself anymore. Beneath everything is him now. He infects your skin and your eyes and your mouth. He is in your hands and your legs and even in your heart you can feel his poison. It is _his_ smirk on the corner of your lips, and _his_ horrid glitter in your pupils, and _his_ cruel aims in your heart. Holding the sink, the curve of the porcelain cold against your fingers, you wonder if you’ll remember yourself when this is all over and done. When he finally leaves your head, whether you’ll ever be able to find the person that was in there before him. You don’t think so. As you cry with your head against the mirror, you know that butterflies don’t remember who they were before. 

You no longer wish you were a butterfly.

When you were little you dreamed of being a butterfly. You dreamed of being free, you dreamed of being able to transform into something so much better than what you were. When you were little you wanted more than anything in the world to have wings of your own, and pretty patterns, and the ability to drink the flowers. You wished that you could float amongst the roses and hide beneath the leaves. That you had a shadow as delicate as any fairy’s could be. When you were young, you wanted to float through the grass with meadows browns, and dance with the large whites, you wanted to sleep with red admirals under the sun, and drift in the sky with the common blue. When you were young, there were so many things about butterflies that you admired, now your thoughts have changed. Now when you sit in the garden, you pity those butterflies, pity how much it must hurt them to be ripped apart and sewn back together by nature itself. How, though the end result is beautiful, much pain they must be in, the agony of flying with newly formed wings. The agony of knowing they’ll only live for a week. You do not envy the butterflies for what they have because now you know the price that they must pay for it. That is the reason you loathe butterflies because they can change, cocoon themselves for weeks and emerge as something completely different, something completely alien to what they were.

You no longer wish you were a butterfly.


End file.
